THE FREE-WILL OF GOD.
WE have received a pamphlet containing three sermons by three Bishops—Carlisle, Bedford, and Manchester— preached at Manchester before the British Association during its visit to that city. They are all three good sermons, though not remarkable sermons, and are all pervaded by the same feeling, so natural in the time and place,—a wish to make all possible concessions to the claims of Science consistent with an unhesitating assertion of the great truths of Christianity. All are slightly apologetic, as if the audience might think the Bishops a little audacious in suggesting that, as Christianity was true, Science could not disprove it. The preachers, in fact, obviously and most sincerely believe both teachings ; and as propositions equally true cannot be mutually destructive, they strive earnestly ;to indicate the line on which reconciliation, even if not yet found, may ultimately be discovered. That is an admirable temper just now for dignitaries of the Church of England, full of a genuine tolerance, of an active love of truth, and of that hopefulness without which, if God reigns, there can be no true wisdom; but, like all good impulses, intellectual charity has its own temptations. There is sometimes a disposi- tion in men who are so fair to be a little too fair ; and we are not sure that, when carefully studied, the Bishops will not be found to have conceded to the physicists just a little more than is either expedient or true. Dr. Goodwin, for example, thinks evolution may be accepted by Christians as a law equivalent in rank and certainty to the law of the conservation of energy, if only they continue to believe in Christ, which, considering that the history of the Christian Christ, as held by believers, is an absolute and direct answer to the universality of evolution, a concrete negative to the theory as a fall explanation of the universe, is rather a bewildering doctrine. If evolution is true, not as a hypothesis accounting for some forms of material development, but as a universal and sufficient law explaining to man the origin of all things inanimate or sentient, then Christ did not reach this world from outside, and Christianity is but a beautiful illusion of the human mind. Dr. Waltham How, again, is hardly quite fair in assuming, as he does, that evolution not only ought to be applied only to material things, but that it is so applied, knowing, as he must do, that the true evolutionist holds mind to have been evolved just as much as matter, and the distinctive doctrines of Christianity to be the natural outcome and growth of ante- cedent circumstances and thoughts. And Dr. Moorhonse surely goes still further, and gives up more than he has intended, when, at the end of a note to his sermon, fall of evidence of his own strong faith, he says :—" For my own part, I see no possible way of alleviating the painful feeling with which we contemplate the existence of natural and moral evil, but by the affirmation of these two facts,—(1), that Nature is the sphere of invariable law; and (2), that man's spirit is the earthly sphere of moral freedom,— of grace and redemption on God's part, of faith and prayer on man's." If Nature is the sphere of invariable law, and of invariable law alone, as the context would seem to imply, what becomes of miracle P or, at all events, of any miracle, such as the Resurrec- tion, not so merely phenomenal that we can explain it by reference to an operative but unascertaiued law P If Will—we will even use the expression "arbitrary will" in order to be clear —neither has nor can have power to disturb the unalterable law which governs the economy of material nature, where is the place left for any present action of the Creator? Prayer
becomes a resultless exercise, beneficial only as a method of devotion, a theory which, true or false, is most unmistakably not the Christian one. Indeed, we need not stretch so high, for where is the place reserved for any material effect from man's free-will ? If there is no free-will, then cadit quce,stio, theological speculation is waste of time, and any theological belief one more illusion ; but if free-will is assumed, as it is by the Bishop on the strongest of all evidence, the universal human consciousness of possessing it, then we cannot set aside the possibility at least of its interfering with the grand law. As a matter of fact, it does interfere with it every day, as every doctor admits who remarks casually that the mental energy of his patient is keeping him alive, in spite of the tendency to death. Man's will or failure of will constantly breaks the invariability of law ; as when an epidemic of suicide develops itself from purely mental causes, or when, as happened in Peru after the Spanish conquest, and in Tasmania after our own settlement there, man's average of life and tendency to renew the race were visibly decreased by the operation of a kind of heart-break which impaired vital energy. Unchanged material causes failed in those instances to produce un- changed results. Doctors say that the patient's will pro- duces the stigmata often observed in hospitals, which is equivalent to saying that the stigmata are not evolved, and that the invariability of law in the sphere of Nature has in that instance been temporarily suspended. Indeed, if it is not so, we hardly know what is meant by free-will ; for a capacity which is always useless, because every material thing is exempted from its action, is, though not unthinkable, little more than a mere phrase. What is the Will, free or bond, if it can make no nerve transmit it to any member ? The will, to be truly free, must not only be free, but operative within some division or other of the sphere of Nature ; and if it is, then there is an immaterial force interfering with the invariable law. Moreover, if man's will is free, & fortiori so must be that of God; and if that is not bound —and we cannot even conceive of complete bondage for the Creator, without denying him the attribute of creative power— then there exists a potential disturbing cause of immeasurable force which may at any moment suspend the invariability of law, and produce what we call "miracle." To say that God will never disturb his own law, is merely assertion ; the fact remains, on the theory, that he, like man, is possessed of free-will, and therefore that be can disturb law, and the rest is a mere question of sufficient evidence. The rejection of the possibility of "miracle"—that is, of a breach in the chain of cause and effect, a break in the " invariability " of physical law—involves a rejection of the assertion of free-will either for man or God, the conclusion of all others, perhaps, which the Bishop of Manchester would most vigorously reject, and even scorn. Why, then, does he accept so unreservedly the enormous proposition in his first clause ?
It seems to us that, as the years draw on, the courage which was once so necessary to the men of science is becoming necessary to theologians in their torn. They seem to be haunted by an idea that some physical truth will some day be discovered which will be fatal to their theological convictions, and to be always endeavouring in advance to conciliate the physicists, by admitting as proved, propositions so far-reaching that their troth can never be folly tested, but which, if true, are fatal to any theology whatever. No theology, except conceivably a belief in Deism reduced to its lowest rudiments, reduced, in fact, to a vanishing-point, is or can be consistent with necessi- tarianism; and in conceding that necessitarianism is true in the sphere of Nature, theology is very nearly given up, and miracle entirely. Nobody can draw a working distinction between the necessary invariability of consequences and necessity itself, though, of coarse, we may, if we please, make a Being the ultimate and far-off cause of invariability. Nay, we can hardly, if logical, allow even that, for if a sentient Will decreed invariability, in- variability is dependent on that Will, and is not the necessary law which physicists assert, and which the Bishop of Manchester seems, and of course only seems, to admit it to be If invaria- bility has never failed, Christ has never risen, and all the Churches built upon his teaching are assiduously propagating dreams.
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